RE: A free lunch with Edward Snowden
If anyone had read the T&C’s they would have seen the clause wherein you accept and agree to allowing them to install a tracking pixel on your phone, which just by the way can’t even be removed if you format the device.
This is FUD. A tracking pixel is just an include link from a third party server of an image so small that you don't see it, and that is named in a way that is unique for each visitor.
Tracking pixels are not "installed" but simply downloaded to your browsing cache like any other image. They do nothing but signal the third party server about visits of the same visitor on every page that implements the tracking pixel. Being plain normal web data, they are trivially removed by a browser cache clean, and obviously a formatting will get rid of them like it will get rid of everything else.
LOL, @recursive, you beat me to it! I didn't read through all the comments at first. Glad there is some common sense floating around in here! Hopefully, you vote me up, and together we can rise to the top of the comments.
yup, that's my understanding of regular tracking pixels too... This one is supposedly different, when I work shopped with the exec he was bragging about this new tech coming out of Malaysia that came with the wifi deployment kit... I'm still digging for more info on it cause I want to dig a lot deeper technically...
However in the mean time I have seen the dataset and its impressive and far more comprehensive than just a regular tracking pixel type data...
It's very possible that a malicious Wifi hotspot would use some exploit on the phone and compromise it. I believe intelligence agencies are doing that routinely not only on public WiFi but also on the very 4G hotspots of your operator, probably with the (forced and gagged) consent of your operator. But then, if you think this was an instance of that, you would need to be more specific about what is being done on the phone: just calling that a "tracking pixel" is conflating unrelated concepts and creating confusion, which makes your post appear as FUD.
I also installed a tracking pixel on my laptop, and even when i format the pixel is still there....no whaitwhait..its just a dead-pixel...damn and i reinstalled Windows, 6 times because of your article..thanks for nothing.